An alternate look at Naturalism

Why should it be, though? You're assuming that said "supernatural" agents are somehow bound by the matter and physics they created and defined. Why should they be restricted by these limitations? They could influence the direction of evolution in ways that cannot observed nor understood, perhaps because the evolutionists are looking in the wrong place. There doesn't have to be a nexus or interface.

Or maybe... it is simply the consciousnesses of all the living beings that are influencing their evolution. The nexus or interface would therefore be the body itself, going with the brain-as-a-filter/reducing-valve theory. There is the idea of a group mind among many who are interested in consciousness. The Hundredth Monkey Effect is an example of this. Rupert Sheldrake could it Morphic Resonance. Perhaps this collective unconscious, this group mind, is what is driving the evolution of a species.

Hang on, it's the ID crowd that posit an agent that controls nature, isn't it? If it is purely "supernatural" how can it impact on nature? I'm not sure they've thought this through.

There's so much special pleading going on here that it can't be surprising that "mainstream science" doesn't take these ideas seriously. Then again, I suspect the product that ID proponents are selling is, in part, trading on the faux indignance of being sidelined from rational debate.

Why should it be, though? You're assuming that said "supernatural" agents are somehow bound by the matter and physics they created and defined. Why should they be restricted by these limitations? They could influence the direction of evolution in ways that cannot observed nor understood, perhaps because the evolutionists are looking in the wrong place. There doesn't have to be a nexus or interface.

Or maybe... it is simply the consciousnesses of all the living beings that are influencing their evolution. The nexus or interface would therefore be the body itself, going with the brain-as-a-filter/reducing-valve theory. There is the idea of a group mind among many who are interested in consciousness. The Hundredth Monkey Effect is an example of this. Rupert Sheldrake could it Morphic Resonance. Perhaps this collective unconscious, this group mind, is what is driving the evolution of a species.

While I think the Hundredth Monkey Effect might be apocryphal Sheldrake does make a case for the spread of behaviours throughout a species, as in his example of bluetit habits.

But there is still stronger evidence for morphic resonance. Because of the German occupation of Holland, milk delivery ceased during 1939-40. Milk deliveries did not resume until 1948. Since bluetits usually live only two to three years, there probably were no bluetits alive in 1948 who had been alive when milk was last delivered. Yet when milk deliveries resumed in 1948, the opening of milk bottles by bluetits sprang up rapidly in quite separate places in Holland and spread extremely rapidly until, within a year or two, it was once again universal. The behavior spread much more rapidly and cropped up independently much more frequently the second time round than the first time. This example demonstrates the evolutionary spread of a new habit which is probably not genetic but rather depends on a kind of collective memory due to morphic resonance.

Whether that effect can be attributed to morphic resonance or to epigenetics, I can't say. I do wonder how genetic modification encodes behaviour, however. Either way, it would seem to be an example which would challenge the ponderously slow evolutionary pace if RM+NS is the sole mechanism. 

I do agree with your question as to why we should insist that the interface or mechanism to be subject to naturalism in its materialist sense. People - including atheists like Thomas Nagel and Christof Koch - seem to have gone the panpsychist route but stop short of the supernatural, suggesting that mind is another universal fundamental like gravity but departing from the strict materialism of Dennett, et al, who maintain that mind is conclusively a product of the brain.

Here's a New York Times article discussing panpsychism and its supporters: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/magazi...ede-t.html

The doctrine that the stuff of the world is fundamentally mind-stuff goes by the name of panpsychism. A few decades ago, the American philosopher Thomas Nagel showed that it is an inescapable consequence of some quite reasonable premises. 

... 

Nagel himself stopped short of embracing panpsychism, but today it is enjoying something of a vogue. The Australian philosopher David Chalmers and the Oxford physicist Roger Penrose have spoken on its behalf. In the recent book “Consciousness and Its Place in Nature,” the British philosopher Galen Strawson defends panpsychism against numerous critics.

...

The rock’s innards “see” the entire universe by means of the gravitational and electromagnetic signals it is continuously receiving. Such a system can be viewed as an all-purpose information processor, one whose inner dynamics mirror any sequence of mental states that our brains might run through. And where there is information, says panpsychism, there is consciousness. In David Chalmers’s slogan, “Experience is information from the inside; physics is information from the outside.”

But the rock doesn’t exert itself as a result of all this “thinking.” Why should it? Its existence, unlike ours, doesn’t depend on the struggle to survive and self-replicate. It is indifferent to the prospect of being pulverized. If you are poetically inclined, you might think of the rock as a purely contemplative being. And you might draw the moral that the universe is, and always has been, saturated with mind, even though we snobbish Darwinian-replicating latecomers are too blinkered to notice.

And here's an article in Scientific American by Koch: https://www.scientificamerican.com/artic...universal/

As a natural scientist, I find a version of panpsychism modified for the 21st century to be the single most elegant and parsimonious explanation for the universe I find myself in. There are three broad reasons why panpsychism is appealing to the modern mind.

Hang on, it's the ID crowd that posit an agent that controls nature, isn't it? If it is purely "supernatural" how can it impact on nature? I'm not sure they've thought this through.

If said agent/s influence and direct matter, then they cannot be "supernatural" or "paranormal" and hence aren't.

But, just because they are within the realms of being "natural", doesn't demand that they are bound to matter or physics. There is more to what is natural than mere matter and physics. If said agent/s created and defined matter and physics, it stands that they choose to not interfere with the rules of the game they made. Why should they spoil their fun?

Psychic phenomena cannot affect matter directly very strongly at all, because it seems rather difficult to bend the rules. Indirectly, though, a physically-bound conscious being can act within the rules to affect desired changes.

Nothing "supernatural" nor "paranormal", just a hard-to-bend set rules of physics and matter. At least QM shows that a person observing subatomic particles like electrons and photons can weakly influence them through conscious observation alone. Now... if you could magnify an intention's energy enough, you might be able to affect matter more reliably.

While I think the Hundredth Monkey Effect might be apocryphal Sheldrake does make a case for the spread of behaviours throughout a species, as in his example of bluetit habits.

Indeed.

Though, what makes you consider that the Hundredth Monkey Effect might be apocryphal?

Whether that effect can be attributed to morphic resonance or to epigenetics, I can't say. I do wonder how genetic modification encodes behaviour, however. Either way, it would seem to be an example which would challenge the ponderously slow evolutionary pace if RM+NS is the sole mechanism.

Why couldn't the two be related in some manner? Consciousness can affect a lot of things, such as with the way we interact with our environment, respond, react, etc, and so, our genes and DNA. If it is our consciousness, albeit the unconscious and subconscious aspects, that influence and direct the matter in our body, then epigenetic changes and morphic resonance could both be an effect of our consciousness. Not that I understand how, though. Just me stringing various ideas together.

I do agree with your question as to why we should insist that the interface or mechanism to be subject to naturalism in its materialist sense. People - including atheists like Thomas Nagel and Christof Koch - seem to have gone the panpsychist route but stop short of the supernatural, suggesting that mind is another universal fundamental like gravity but departing from the strict materialism of Dennett, et al, who maintain that mind is conclusively a product of the brain.

Panpsychism seems to me like the result of materialists wanting to have their cake and eat it to. They can continue just explaining it all away as usual. They're just avoiding the real questions while pretending to answer them.

Physicist Bernardo Kastrup has made some good arguments against why panpsychism is viable:

http://www.bernardokastrup.com/2015/05/the-threat-of-panpsychism-warning.html

https://www.scienceandnonduality.com/non...o-kastrup/

But, just because they are within the realms of being "natural", doesn't demand that they are bound to matter or physics. There is more to what is natural than mere matter and physics. If said agent/s created and defined matter and physics, it stands that they choose to not interfere with the rules of the game they made. Why should they spoil their fun?

On the question of the mechanism, I am trying to see it from the point of view of the materialist. The very word "mechanism" suggests a physical origin - something of this world which can be analysed and replicated. It harks back to the mechanistic universe of Newton (which, I am convinced, most materialists are more comfortable with). Yet I do see the problem if we think of this in dualistic terms - a supernatural realm having influence over a physical world. There is a separation there which does indeed seem to require some kind of mechanism to bridge the two.

That is why I am not a dualist. I don't believe in that separation. I believe it is an illusion and that the above mentioned panpsychists are on the right track but stop short. Mind is not only in everything, it is everything. Mind is not influencing evolution, it is evolving. What we observe as nature is merely the surface of a profoundly creative process and what we see as nature's constituent parts are intimately connected to that process. If I could pretend to understand it, Bohm's holomovement might be closer to what I'm trying to describe.

The holomovement is a key concept in David Bohm's interpretation of quantum mechanics and for his overall worldview. It brings together the holistic principle of “undivided wholeness” with the idea that everything is in a state of process or becoming (or what he calls the “universal flux») For Bohm, wholeness is not a static oneness, but a dynamic wholeness-in-motion in which everything moves together in an interconnected process. The concept is presented most fully in Wholeness and the implicate order published in 1980.

Indeed.

Though, what makes you consider that the Hundredth Monkey Effect might be apocryphal?

I thought I read that somewhere. Maybe look it up if you want to confirm it?

Why couldn't the two be related in some manner? Consciousness can affect a lot of things, such as with the way we interact with our environment, respond, react, etc, and so, our genes and DNA. If it is our consciousness, albeit the unconscious and subconscious aspects, that influence and direct the matter in our body, then epigenetic changes and morphic resonance could both be an effect of our consciousness. Not that I understand how, though. Just me stringing various ideas together.

See my other responses. I'm not too far from your argument here.

Panpsychism seems to me like the result of materialists wanting to have their cake and eat it to. They can continue just explaining it all away as usual. They're just avoiding the real questions while pretending to answer them.

Physicist Bernardo Kastrup has made some good arguments against why panpsychism is viable:

Yes, I read his arguments a while ago and I tend to agree with Bernardo on this. He's an idealist too.

Having mentioned David Bohm, I wondered whether he had anything to say about Darwinism. I haven't found a direct quote but did find this commentary on his work. Turns out to be particularly apt in view of some of the posts above.

Order In Science

The implications of this are potentially very far reaching for all of science. The new field of chaos theory has rigorously demonstrated that in virtually all nonlinear deterministic systems (which characterize most scientific models of physical processes), there is a domain in which the system behaves as if it were random, even though it is actually deterministic. The epistemological implications of this are sweeping: in any discipline of science, when scientists describe the behavior of a natural system as random, this label may not describe the natural system at all, but rather their degree of understanding of that system--which could be complete ignorance. Random empirical data provide no guarantee that the underlying natural process being investigated is itself random. Thus, while "randomness" may usefully characterize the empirical observations of the natural process, this reveals little about the actual nature of the process. Hidden orders or subtle variables may be operating at a level that is beyond the ability of current instruments or concepts to detect. The far-reaching implications of this are evident when one considers, for example, the possibility that the "random mutation" that underpins Darwin's theory of natural selection may soon be regarded as just one arbitrary hypothesis among many. The observed randomness of biological mutations gives no assurance that unknown subtle processes are not operative--hidden beyond the veil of today's empirical science. Such unknown forces could include such "taboo" possibilities as teleological factors, divine design, Sheldrake's morphogenetic fields, and so on.

Bohm's conclusion about order in science is unequivocal and sweeping: the prevailing mechanistic order in science must be dropped. Mainstream physics -- from Newton's laws to the most advanced contemporary quantum relativistic field theory -- all utilize the same mechanistic order, symbolized by the Cartesian coordinate system. This reflects a particular mechanistic order that has characterized physics for literally centuries, and it is this order that Bohm challenges directly. Science must open itself to far more sophisticated and subtle forms of order, including what Bohm calls generative orders, which are orders that generate structure. The implicate order is perhaps the most important example of a generative order.

Shit, Paul - I don't know how. I'm not a researcher nor a philosopher. I'm just convinced that the view that accident from chaos is the inevitable cause of all the complexity and apparent design in our universe has to be wrong and is based on the ideological rejection of mind: the commitment to materialism. Clearly the universe has physical laws. Why? Why not pure chaos? Why anything at all? The most parsimonious answer is to invoke mind but you can't have that because mind would allow for a deity and you are nothing if not a committed atheist. These discussions here are nothing to do with skepticism, they are a thinly veiled proselytisation of atheism and materialism.

But invoking mind is no more parsimonious, unless you completely ignore all the questions you just asked as far as they concern the origin of the mind. We have complexity in the universe and we have to explain it all the way down before invoking Occam.

In answer to your next question, perhaps mind is uncreated and eternal just as wise men have been saying for thousands of years.

Or perhaps some objective source of universes is uncreated and eternal. People object to the "universe from nothing" argument, but it's pretty much the same as the "mind from nothing" argument.

Don't limit it to ID - broaden your scope. Don't you see that in order to maintain your ideology you have to reject, a priori, all that we discuss on this forum (and, of course, that is exactly what you do). Nothing beyond the "natural". Mind arising mysteriously from chemicals and all of parapsychology a futile pursuit of the impossible. You are doing what Methodological Naturalism has done to science - limit the scope of what you can consider to what you find acceptable.

I'm happy not to reject it a priori. I just don't know how we construct a fruitful set of hypotheses about a supernatural entity, if that entity is invisible.

~~ Paul

Why should it be, though? You're assuming that said "supernatural" agents are somehow bound by the matter and physics they created and defined. Why should they be restricted by these limitations? They could influence the direction of evolution in ways that cannot observed nor understood, perhaps because the evolutionists are looking in the wrong place. There doesn't have to be a nexus or interface.

I don't see how this supernatural agent, unbound by physics, can affect physics without a nexus. There has to be some point in the chain of cause and effect where a supernatural cause has a natural effect.

Or maybe... it is simply the consciousnesses of all the living beings that are influencing their own evolution on an unconscious level. The nexus or interface would therefore be the body itself, going with the brain-as-a-filter/reducing-valve theory. There is the idea of a group mind among many who are interested in consciousness. The Hundredth Monkey Effect is an example of this. Rupert Sheldrake called it Morphic Resonance. Perhaps this collective unconscious, this group mind, is what is driving the evolution of a species.

Again, there has to be a way in which this (supernatural?) collective unconscious has physical effects.

If we are to picture this as

supernatural entity --> supernatural effect --> ... --> supernatural cause --poof--> natural effect

then you can't ask scientists to study it. There is no way to study --poof-->.

~~ Paul

But invoking mind is no more parsimonious, unless you completely ignore all the questions you just asked as far as they concern the origin of the mind. We have complexity in the universe and we have to explain it all the way down before invoking Occam.

Or perhaps some objective source of universes is uncreated and eternal. People object to the "universe from nothing" argument, but it's pretty much the same as the "mind from nothing" argument.

I'm happy not to reject it a priori. I just don't know how we construct a fruitful set of hypotheses about a supernatural entity, if that entity is invisible.

~~ Paul

I disagree. Firstly it isn't really a mind from nothing that I was suggesting - it is an eternal, uncreated mind, that which has always been, not that which appeared out of nothing. Secondly, mind is inherently creative, matter without mind is incapable of creativity so its activity is dependent on laws which order and constrain. No amount of order out of chaos would be possible without that precision of physical laws and constants so you have to then argue that those too appeared by accident or you have to propose multitudes of universes just to allow for our "goldilocks" universe. So how is that more parsimonious?